The Dreaming Tree

by Matthew Mather

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  “Can’t it wait?” Penny said. “Nicolae is almost here.”

  “I can go in my pants if you prefer. I need to talk to Dr. Danesti, too. I didn’t try to run when you came. I know I’m not right in the head, but I do know when I gotta go to the bathroom.” He paused and added, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I know I’ve been difficult.”

  Penny kept her eyes on him for a second, then looked at the big man by the door, who nodded at the two men behind him.

  The big man indicated for Roy to come forward.

  Roy stood and reached for his coat.

  When the men reacted, he said, “My antirejection drugs are in the pocket. I need to take them.”

  The knife was on the table but far out of reach. They had searched him already.

  “That’s fine,” Penny said.

  Roy stayed relaxed and slouched until he was just past the door frame. Part of him just wanted to take a whiz, but another part of him …

  He turned as if he’d forgotten something. The two men behind him were still on the other side of Penny, the fourth at the far side of the table. He felt the guy following him stop, and the guy in front took a quick step toward him.

  Unhurried, Roy let his weight carry him around. He ducked and brought his left leg out in a sweeping motion. It clipped the first man’s left calf just as Roy’s palm hit the hollow of his left shoulder. The man yelped as he fell backward, banging the back of his head on the table edge.

  The men still in the dining room lunged forward, but they had to navigate past Penny and a few chairs to get through the narrow door. Roy needed only a second’s head start.

  He slammed the dining room door shut behind him and heard a body bounce off it. The man at the far side of the table had dashed around from the kitchen, only to trip over the ottoman that Roy shoved in front of him with his foot. He rolled, and just as he came up on his feet, Roy caught him under the chin with an uppercut, and he was out.

  Roy dashed out the front door and down the porch steps, to Penny’s Range Rover. She never took the keys out of the ignition—a habit that annoyed Roy, but not today.

  As he grabbed the door handle, he had a fleeting realization that he’d made a mistake. Shadows darted forward in his left and right peripheral vision at the same time.

  He had miscalculated. It was his last thought before a hammering blow knocked him back.

  45

  Searing white lights blinded Roy. His mouth had the coppery taste of blood, and his throbbing head wouldn’t stay upright.

  “You think we damaged him?” said a familiar-sounding voice.

  “I don’t think so,” another voice replied.

  “I mean his neck or something. You hit him pretty hard, and I think maybe we gave him too much sodium.”

  “He’s at least two hundred pounds. I don’t think … Hey, he’s awake.”

  “What?” Roy tried to bring a hand up to rub his eyes but couldn’t.

  Was he paralyzed again?

  But no, he was sitting up.

  He struggled some more.

  “Mr. Lowell-Vandeweghe, can you hear me?”

  Ropes held his hands behind him. He looked down and tried to focus his bleary eyes. His feet were tied to the legs of a wooden chair. The spotlights were so bright, he could feel their heat on his face.

  Roy stuttered, “Who … what is this?”

  The voice asked, “Why did you hire Angel Rodriguez? Are you working for Hizb-i-Gulbuddin?”

  “How would this guy be connected to them?” murmured the other voice.

  “Eden Corporation has tentacles everywhere. Maybe they’re making some kind of supersoldier.”

  “Let’s start simpler. Not go crazy.”

  Roy blinked hard a few times, trying to clear his eyes. He struggled briefly against the ropes binding his hands. Those voices.

  “Dog? Alpha? Is that you guys?”

  Silence for a few beats, then hushed whispers. Two loud clicks, and the spotlights dimmed. The room came into focus. Rough concrete walls. Stacks of twisted sheet metal beside a green dumpster. Little white clouds puffed into the cold air with each labored breath. Two men were silhouetted against a job light hung from an extension cord behind them.

  Roy said, “Where’s Angel? Is he with you?”

  Was this some kind of rescue operation? He was still groggy. The last thing he remembered was trying to escape from Sam’s house. He’d gotten outside and was about to jump into the Range Rover, then noticed that someone else was outside. Something had hit him in the head.

  “Can you guys untie me?”

  One of the men approached. “When did you last see Angel?” It was Dog, the one with the gorilla jaw.

  “Angel’s not with you?” Roy strained against the ropes. The wooden chair flexed under him. “I saw him. After Dr. Brixton. Last time I saw him was with you guys.”

  “When were you with Dr. Brixton?”

  “A day … maybe two days ago? I’m not sure.”

  “I’ll tell you what we’re sure of.” Dog walked back toward the other man, between the two floodlights on tripods. He picked up a cell phone from a pile of objects on a table between them. “You were the last person to talk to Angel. The cops tracked the phone number, but it was to a burner phone, paid for with cash at a CVS in midtown. They don’t know who bought it, not yet, but we do.”

  “What do you mean, last person to talk to Angel? Where is he?”

  “Charlie said that number was your number. He hasn’t told the police yet. He wanted to wait till we talked to you.”

  “I still don’t understand. Can you guys untie me?”

  Dog put down the phone and picked up some sheets of paper. He walked back to Roy and clicked on a flashlight. Held the papers out. Images of Angel splayed out on a sidewalk, half-covered in snow and congealed blood.

  Roy felt nauseated.

  He turned his head away, but Dog pushed the pictures closer in front of his face. “That’s where Angel is. You talked to him five minutes before that. Did you meet him?”

  “I don’t … I don’t remember.”

  “You better start remembering, or we’re telling the police who the owner of that phone number was.”

  “I black out sometimes. Ask Charlie.”

  “We have asked Charlie. That’s the only reason your body isn’t at the bottom of the East River … yet.” The man’s face creased up. “You know what Angel went through, man? They’d just got their boy, started a family.” His face resumed its expression of hostile blankness.

  Roy asked, “Is he dead?”

  “He’s hanging on by a thread, in the ICU at New York Presbyterian.”

  “Did he say I did that to him?”

  “He hasn’t woken up yet. Maybe won’t ever.”

  Dog went back to the table and put down the pictures. He picked up Roy’s coat.

  “We’ve been through your stuff. A few thousand in cash, some passports. Looks like you were ready to run.” He held up a clear plastic bag with a black-and-white picture in it. “Who is Adhira Achari?”

  Roy leaned forward in the chair and felt its joints squeak. “A woman in India. Angel got her name from an old doctor.”

  “And who is she to you?”

  “I’m not sure. Maybe my mother.”

  “Your …?”

  “Surrogate mother. Angel found out I was maybe born to her.”

  Dog took a second to process this, then held up another paper, encased in clear plastic. “And what does ‘Heaven all benefits, trust to all highoz’ mean?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Dog brought the paper closer. “What does it mean?” he asked again.

  Roy looked at the scribbled piece of white paper.

  “It was in Angel�
�s wallet. The only thing we couldn’t make sense of, apart from that picture of the Indian woman.”

  “I don’t know. It means nothing to me, either.”

  Alpha shook his head and said to Dog, “I think we need to give him some time to wake up. Let’s go get some coffee.” He turned to Roy. “You go anywhere, and we kill you—you understand?”

  * * *

  Roy listened to the two men’s voices recede into the distance.

  Angel was attacked?

  He remembered a fuzzy memory, talking to Angel.

  These guys are going to kill us.

  Roy listened hard to the sounds around him.

  He heard the distant white noise of cars sweeping by on a freeway. With a grunting effort, using the balls of his feet, he pushed the chair back. It went up onto its back legs, then rocked forward. Leaning with it, he put all his weight onto his toes, then jumped back with everything he had.

  The chair and Roy together shot up into the air a foot, tilted at an angle, and crashed onto the concrete floor. The chair’s back legs broke off, and the back separated from the seat. He gasped for air, strained, and pulled his hands under himself, then under his feet. He leaned to his side and got onto his knees, then stood. The ropes were loose now, and he pulled his hands out of them and untied himself.

  And listened.

  Still nothing.

  He hobbled forward and grabbed his coat. He was freezing cold and shivering. He checked the pockets. The cash was still there. He grabbed the two plastic envelopes with the picture and scribbled note and limped in the opposite direction from where Dog and Alpha had gone.

  There was a set of stairs to the rear.

  * * *

  “There he goes,” Dog said.

  He lay on a mat on the fourth floor of the half-finished apartment complex.

  “Let me see.” Alpha took the night-vision binoculars from his partner and adjusted the focus. A grainy green image of Roy scrambling through bushes came into view. “He’s making for the freeway.”

  “You think he did it?”

  “I don’t think he even knows what he did.”

  “But you think he attacked Angel?”

  Alpha gave the binoculars back. “Charlie said that Angel got hurt trying to get whatever was on that paper to Roy.”

  “I seen some weird stuff out in the world, but this …” Dog kept the night-vision gear on Roy as he scampered away.

  “We track him. We see where he goes. Who he meets. Follow him everywhere.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But if he ever comes back near Charlie or looks like he’ll hurt someone else …”

  “We put him out of everybody’s misery.”

  * * *

  “Can you call me a taxi?” Roy released a pile of chocolate bars onto the counter.

  He had already opened a bottle of water and was halfway through guzzling it down. He put on his coat and zipped it up tight around his neck.

  “There’s a pay phone out beside the propane tank,” the Quickie Mart cashier replied.

  The teenager didn’t register the least surprise at the vagrant dirtbag who had emerged from the bushes in the darkness. Not much was unusual for a New Jersey Turnpike gas station.

  Roy produced a crumpled hundred-dollar bill. “Can I get a few dollars in change? Keep twenty for your trouble.”

  The cashier held the bill up to the light, then punched up the total and handed back three twenties and a pile of quarters. “Have a good day.”

  A car pulled into the gas station, and a woman got out to come inside.

  Roy stuffed the chocolate bars into his pockets and hunched, keeping his face concealed. He pushed open the doors to the outside and watched the cars hissing past on the turnpike. Angel’s friends were going to kill him, and who knew what else those maniacs might do.

  He looked down the road, felt that familiar tug. Toward the small house on the north side of Long Island. Toward Hope and Elsa. He couldn’t let himself give in to the urge, didn’t know what he might do—what Jake might do—if he let himself go back there. He dropped a quarter into the phone and dialed a number.

  It rang twice.

  “Hello?” his wife answered.

  “Baby, it’s me.”

  “What happened? Who were those men?”

  “Just some friends.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Don’t worry. Just give me a little time. I’m coming home. For Christmas.”

  46

  “So you got into a bit of a pickle with Basilone, I hear,” Del’s father said.

  They had settled on the sitting room couch in the three-story red-brick house on Brooklyn’s Eighth Avenue, just a block from Prospect Park.

  “Always follow yer instincts, and find a way to do t’ings, but the key is don’t get caught doing it. Remember, ‘Devlin’ means ‘fierce’ in Gaelic. Live up to your name.”

  “I thought you said it meant ‘unlucky.’”

  Her father smiled sideways. “Depends which Paddy you’re speaking to.” He paused. “What I’m meaning is, always find a way to do the right t’ings.”

  “Of course.”

  Del paused before asking, “Why is it you’ve never gone back to Ireland? You’ve never taken me, never gone back yourself in thirty years.”

  “That’s just the past, is all.”

  “But you had a brother. And your dad is still there.”

  “Brother died a long time ago.” Her father took a sip of his drink. “And I just don’t get on with my dad.” He changed the topic. “Always try to do the right thing, Del, but don’t get caught doing it.” He winked and smiled.

  He hadn’t really answered her question, but she let it go. She always let it go, sensing some old wound, but one day she needed to know what had happened.

  Her dad said, “When it seems there’s nothing more to be done, there’s always something more to be done. You think about that.”

  She nodded.

  “Don’t believe anything he says.” Her mother sang the words from the kitchen. “Est-ce que tu va rester la nuit?” Was Del going to spend the night?

  “Oui.” Her mother always tried to slip in a little Creole French when they spoke. Del rolled her eyes and smiled at her dad before adding, “Hey, Mom, I was meaning to ask you, did you work with the Phipps family a lot back when you were starting out?”

  “Qui?”

  “The Phipps family. Out in Southampton.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “You never heard of the Phippses? They have that massive estate out there.”

  “My ears are working perfectly,” her mom replied. “Are yours? I told you, I never heard of them.”

  That was odd. Del filed the information into the back of her mind, behind the other thoughts that kept circling through her head.

  The NYPD had searched Angel Rodriguez.

  With her dad’s help, she had managed to get a look at the evidence. One thing he’d written on a scrap of paper and put in his wallet: “Heaven all benefits, Trust all highoz.” The NYPD detective in charge of the case had attributed it to a religious quote of some sort, hadn’t paid it much attention, but it stuck in Del’s mind.

  “Are you feeling better, Dad?” she said. “No chest pain?”

  Her father had learned a long time ago not to try to lie to her. “Just a little, here and there. I keep the stress down.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be drinking that.”

  He frowned at the glass of whisky in his hand—and that was “whisky” with a “y” and not “ey” as he was fond of pointing out to the less enlightened. “It’s Christmas, and a wee dram isn’t going to hurt. And”—he nodded at the vodka soda in her hand—“I’ll not let a lady drink alone.”

  She asked, “Have you thought about retiri
ng?”

  Thirty-four years in the NYPD had taken its toll. He had remained a beat cop as long as they would let him—almost twenty-five years—before forcing him up the ranks. He loved the electricity of being in the streets, but it had made him older than his years. Turning sixty this year, and he’d already had two heart attacks. With his pension and the value of the house that they bought thirty years ago—just before Giuliani began the cleanup of New York—he didn’t have to work anymore. But then, what would he do with himself?

  He picked up the painting Del had brought for her mother. “When are you going to start painting with colors?”

  The doorbell rang, and Del’s mother, her beautiful black hair now streaked proudly with gray, swept past them to open the door. “And when you are you finding a nice boy?” she said as she passed. “That Officer Coleman seems very sweet.”

  Del rolled her eyes. “He’s married, Mom.”

  She got up to greet her sister and her husband. Their two kids, three and four years old, ran in screaming and yelling to greet the new puppy, who made just as much noise.

  Del’s phone pinged.

  Her mother’s face scrunched up while she was still hugging her son-in-law. “I thought we said all cell phones were to be off.”

  “I’ll turn it off now,” Del promised, but she pulled it out just to check.

  It was a text from Esposito.

  “Mom, Dad, just give me a second, okay?”

  * * *

  Del locked herself in the bathroom and opened her text messages.

  “Sorry about giving you up to Basilone,” Esposito’s message read. “Had no choice. But I did track down that Latino-looking guy Roy was with. In front of that bar? Goes by the name of Fedora. He’s a small-time hood that works with the Matruzzi family out of Queens.”

  She had never heard of Fedora before, but the Matruzzis—why did they always seem to turn up in this?

  The next text read, “Here’s the high-res video of the Rodriguez attack you asked for. Forty-eight-bit color, unencrypted. You’d better look at it on a big screen.”

  She had already seen the footage, and although she had no way to see the full face, there were flashes of the side of the attacker’s face, and some of his arm that became exposed. She wanted to look at it in more detail.